Three months passed. Food was short in this region after another bad harvest, and the machines sent us out to forage what we could in the wild. It was a fight for existence, and there were no rules. Nothing mattered but survival, and the men fought hard for a life that had little to offer.
They left us to fend for ourselves most of the time, but today the machines had rounded us up and driven us down from the hills to the township like a herd of cattle. They were putting us through a selection test for what was rumoured to be some kind of special operation, but the bar could not be set high.
We were a sorry-looking lot—thin, half-starved, and many carried injuries. Most were basic-level humans, whose distant ancestors had been abducted and bred as slaves by the machines. None of the men knew anything of their ancestral heritage, but they looked human. My lineage was quite different.
These people were my cousins on the evolutionary ladder, but my ancestors had branched off and evolved as a separate species, although we were virtually indistinguishable in appearance. The rate of our development far exceeded that of the original Homo sapiens, and we left Earth for another home at a time when our cousins were building their first civilisations. Some evidence of our existence on Earth was left in the form of the monuments that we erected, and memories of us were preserved in the myths and legends of the early tribes, but that matters little. The best of our best were elevated to the immaterial world, and it was from there that I first came to Earth.
I took my place in line and waited for my turn to be processed. A man a few places further down swayed back and forth before he collapsed and hit the floor with a loud thud. A guard dragged him away and hoisted him up by the back of his neck against a metal inspection panel. A scanner dropped down and made a dual pass up and down his body before returning to its original resting place about ten feet up.
All of us in the line stood and watched.
We knew where to look, and all our eyes rested on the decision-making computer we had nicknamed 'Nero'.
Thumbs up meant you lived, and thumbs down meant you died.
The man in front of me said, "I got ten tokes that say he fries."
"Taken," said a man further down the line. "Old Jacob is tougher than he looks."
We didn't have to wait long; the computer screen glowed a purple thumbs down.
The gambler grunted, "Easy money," as a powerful electric current shot through Jacob's body and killed him outright. The guard dragged the smouldering corpse away for recycling, and I felt disgust at their treatment by the machines; they deserved better than that.
A ten-toke piece spun through the air, and my neighbour deftly caught it in one hand, but, unluckily for him, a guard had spotted the movement and sent a punishment laser blast into his body. The man bent over in agony, but he didn't fall; he knew that if he hit the deck, he would never get up again. A man's ability to withstand a reduced power blast showed that he was strong and healthy, and they needed the best specimens available for the assignment. I picked up the coin and stuffed it into the pocket of the man in front as he staggered forward.
"Hope you think it was worth it," I whispered.
Ten tokes would buy a hardtack biscuit from the company store; the weevils came free. I had now reached the top of the line, and a couple of service droids ushered me into a cubicle. It was the same setup as before, and the droids clamped me to a vertical board, while a scanner dropped down and did a double pass. I would present the identical form as a regular human. I knew this, but I still experienced a moment of anxiety before I got a bright yellow thumbs-up from Nero. The droids guided me left into an almost full compound; the selection process must be nearing its end.
I received ten days of continuous physical enhancement through chemical infusions and exercise, and I reacted appropriately to the treatments, although I had no problem resisting the enhancement programme. The weaker stock among us immediately became hybrids and had parts, mainly limbs, replaced. Others became full-on machines, but I passed through without modification. The top physical specimens were being saved for a much more sophisticated hybrid programme.
The peak of the designer's ambition was to perfectly integrate man and machine. What the leaders hoped for was a hybrid that possessed true consciousness that they could claim for themselves. The old dream had never died.
Now came the mental adjustments. We received an implant that increased our intelligence, and they programmed us to use human technology. They also gave us the ability to speak to the inhabitants of the host world in their language, but they instructed us to follow a strict policy of non-fraternisation. The host world was Earth, and the coming invasion by the humanoid sims was in the way of a test run before a full-scale invasion, but I would not be going with the pioneers. I would make the journey tonight, and alone, to a distant part of the satellite world, where my mind would be implanted into a machine.
They allowed us to move freely around the compound at this late stage in our training, and there were no guards in the transportation suite. I was familiar with the equipment, and it was as easy for me to use as it had been to disable my chip. Access to inter-dimensional craft had been the sole objective of my entering the enhancement programme.
My mission was to re-establish contact with a boy who was living on a satellite of Earth under the control of artificial intelligence. He was an unknowing refugee from our elevated dimension, sent away by our elders as an infant for his protection.
He was living with a couple, James and Mary Mandell. They were not his real parents, but the boy, David, was unaware. I was an uncle to David as Steven Mandell.
Tragedy struck, and James and Mary, who were involved in the resistance movement against machine governance, were captured and executed. I narrowly escaped capture myself and fled from the satellite world. There was nothing I could do to help James and Mary.
The machines did not suspect David, as he was so young, and he was adopted into the growing number of orphans who were cared for communally by the human population.
I had to care for David, which was both my wish and my duty, but I could never return to the satellite in human form; the machines had devices that could penetrate even the most skilful disguise.
A difficult decision had to be made, but I didn't hesitate. With the help of highly trained surgeons and bioengineers sympathetic to the cause, my mind would be temporarily removed from my physical body and planted in the brain of an intelligent, standard robot used for general-purpose duties. The programmed brain of the robot would operate normally and be unaware of my presence, but I could override its circuits to hear and speak as myself through the artificial organs of the machine. It was the perfect way to infiltrate the human community undetected, and the resistance would ensure that I appeared on the correct requisition lists and was allocated an area of duty that would keep me close to David.
I would arrive on the satellite in the time sector when David was eight years old, shortly after the loss of his step-parents. My mission was to watch over him and keep him safe from harm until he was eighteen. The arrangements would be made for me to accompany him, even if the machines selected him for work beyond the time zone occupied by the satellite world. I would also educate him to a much higher level than the machines normally allowed for non-specialist humans.
My long-term objective was to prepare him to lead an army in a battle between humans and artificial intelligence for the physical governance of Earth, but in the more significant subtext, it would be a spiritual battle between the representatives of good and evil. A victory for the good would force the personification of evil to abdicate his role in human affairs.
That is my history.
All that followed is recorded in this narrative.
The last time you heard of me and Sol, we were presumed to have fallen to our deaths down a ravine and were out of the story.
Did you believe that we would leave David to battle on alone?